Let me explain.

The cartoon affair reminds me of the 1992 flap over Sinead O'Connor ripping up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live, writ large. I remember that distinctly, because at the time I was a student at the University of Notre Dame, home of Fighting Irish football and sentimental summit of American Catholicism.

It's there I learned that it's not difficult for a small but motivated gang to scare a lot of people into doing what you want. You just need the will and the opportunity.

Our gang of five studentgovernment geeks decided to become agitators for that week. Our proto-neocon cabal . . . including a guy who was already producing attack ads for Minnesota Republican candidates in his spare time, and another whose father was head of corporate media relations for McDonald's . . . decided to see if we could force NBC, the network that carried Sinead's protest, to apologise.

I rang the office of Los Angeles archbishop Roger Mahony, whom we saw quoted condemning the act and the broadcast as "antiCatholic". We told his aides of our sinister plan and they in turn gave a friendly Los Angeles Times reporter our phone number. Using the McDonald's dad's contacts book, we simultaneously signalled our intentions to NBC via the private fax numbers of some of their key executives.

Our plan centred on a threat. Nothing so crass or obvious as inciting a rent-amob to burn down an NBC affiliate or putting a fatwa on Sinead O'Connor . . .

though we certainly planned to tap into an atavistic Irish Catholic sense of victimhood and whip the nutters and useful idiots into synthetic outrage. We also wanted to win, so we went after the money . . . the key to any successful threat being to target what your opponent values most.

NBC paid $75m in 1990 for a five-year contract to televise Notre Dame home football games. A key visual of these telecasts was our cheering student section of fresh-freckle-faced lasses and lads attracting the millions of 'subway alumni' watching at home, and the advertisers who wanted to sell to them. So we threatened to turn the next home game into a spectacle condemning NBC. The network would be in a bind . . .

show the placards and give itself a black eye or endure the media furore we could conjure if they 'censored' us.

After a few weak statements about Sinead's right to free speech, NBC caved and apologised . . . at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops no less.

Not before the Chicago Tribune published a satirical cartoon about the incident, depicting Catholic priests as paedophiles, with predictable reaction.

I'm not particularly proud of my part in that episode, my little contribution to bringing about the extinction of Enlightenment values we're watching now.

We were just a few kids out for badness, amazed at how easy it was to inflame religious victimhood, manipulate the public debate of millions of people and get supposedly powerful people to sell out their avowed values. The Danish imams who kicked this off must be similarly bewildered at their vastly greater success, having tapped powerful patrons in Syria and Iran and sent most Western media and governments cowering into a corner.

NBC insisted our threat had nothing to do with their decision to back down . . . just as Dermot Ahern and his peers insist they're not backing down to threats of more violence when they condemn publication of the cartoons while insisting that "of course" they defend freedom of speech.

NBC may have suspected that we had no more authority to speak for America's Catholics than you might expect five over-caffeinated, undersexed, supremely arrogant college boys might have. But they weren't willing to take that risk.

Western governments and media are now willing to elevate a small group of Islamofascists armed with half-truths into authentic spokespersons for an imagined Muslim monolith.

NBC executives then feared, at worst, for their annual bonuses. Western governments and media today are in thrall to fears of deadlier varieties.

Besides the scale and lethality of the disputes, there is another big difference. We had no agenda beyond our own pathetic amusement and possession of a tale that might one day land us a gig in PR or talk radio. But we knew rot and weakness when we smelled it. The Islamofascists smell it too.